not sure how it is related to bash but the key answer is time to recover!

Since 8.0 your db has grown a lot, did you also update your tape libraries to maintain a reasonable time to recover? Maybe your HA requirements just changed in such a way a downtime of 1 hour got unacceptable, well, probably you do not need flashback database (it is 10)

I was joking about features that comes with latest releases and scripts that last for a decade
Actually I write my scripts with latest features of bash,gawk, and perl (the perl shipped within oracle) for a certain platform because I guess future installations will do have at least these ones! I rearrange/rewrite indeed the scripts for various unix flavours.
Could I live without JMX just because java 1.4 doesn’t have it?